Indigenous issues

With the country facing significant and unpredictable headwinds going into another federal election year, the 2019 Alternative Federal Budget (AFB) shows that Canada can boost competitiveness and encourage innovation by investing in people, not by giving corporations more tax cuts.

For six weeks in May and June 1919, approximately 35,000 workers in the Prairie city of Winnipeg walked off the job to voice their frustration with a range of issues, from a lack of collective bargaining rights and union recognition to increasing inequality. Indeed, the strike was part of a broader wave of worker revolts that swept across Canada and the world in 1919, as working people in numerous Canadian cities and countries used the strike—the withdrawal of labour power—to push for change.

The right to the city comes out of critical theory, a branch of intellectual thought originating in the early 20th century at the University of Frankfurt. The Frankfurt School consisted of a group of radical scholars who theorized about the rise of mass popular culture and its effect on society.

This study finds milk is significantly costlier in First Nations communities than in Winnipeg and Northern Manitoba. The cost was higher in First Nations with and without access to an all-weather road. The study is based on a milk price survey in August and September 2016 in 26 stores located in 22 communities in north­ern Manitoba (15 First Nation and 8 non-First Nation communities) and 11 stores in Winnipeg for comparative purposes.

In the span of a decade, we have moved from the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples being largely absent from political and public discourse in BC, to being fully endorsed by both the federal and provincial governments. In May 2017, implementation of the UN Declaration was called “foundational” to the Confidence and Supply Agreement between the BC NDP and BC Green Party. Two months later, each new BC cabinet minister was tasked with implementing the UN Declaration in their mandate letters from the Premier. This is indeed good news.

(Coast Salish Territories/ Vancouver) A report released today outlines for the first time what implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples could and should look like in BC law, policy and practices; the BC government has explicitly committed to adopt and implement the UN Declaration.

Implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is a central political and public policy issue around the world. The BC government has committed to fully adopting the UN Declaration and this ground-breaking report, for the first time, outlines what implementation could and should look like in BC law, policy and practices.

Indigenous peoples have a troubled relationship with the systems that have been imposed by settler colonial populations. The imposition of education through the residential school system was devastating to Indigenous peoples, with the legacy living on in Canada’s child welfare system. Part of ending this cycle of the removal of children means providing culturally relevant and quality child care.